Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with tiny Global Equities Research, contends that 7 minutes of the June 7 keynote by Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been blocked off for a presentation by Microsoft to talk about Visual Studio 2010, the company’s suite of development tools. Chowdhry says the new version of VS will allow developers to write native applications for the iPhone, iPad and Mac OS. And here’s the kicker: he thinks Microsoft’s presentation could be given by none other than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

If that's true, it would be a very visible turn about. Even if it's not true, you have to consider where Apple is in the most relevant space (mobile) compared to MS right now. Apple is in the lead, and MS is busy rearranging the deck chairs.

People have been telling Ruper Murdoch to put up or shut up for awhile - meaning, if he really thinks that "Google is stealing his content", he should just use robots.txt to cut off access to his news sites. Well - it seems that he's going to try that experiment:

The papers, which plan to start charging users for access to their newly redesigned Web sites in late June, will prevent Google and other search engines from linking to their stories. Although they are not the first papers to erect pay barriers around their content, the papers are going a step further by making most of their site invisible to Google's Web crawler. Except for their homepages, no stories will show up on Google.

I have no idea how they expect anyone to find their material after that. It's not like the old days, when you would walk out, get the paper off the driveway and browse - now you find things via:

Search

Friend referrals (Twitter, Facebook, etc)

Automated Search (Google News, Yahoo News, etc)

RSS/Atom (not the mainstream, but a lot of influencers)

Notice what's not on that list - directly visiting the site. Oh sure, there are people who go to media sites directly (I'll go to the NY Times for baseball coverage, for instance). But I don't think it's the primary way it happens. Within a month, I expect that traffic will drop off precipitously at these outlets, and Murdoch will end up executing a painful climb down from his idiotic "Google is stealing from me" mindset. It won't just be painful though; it will be costly. Whatever rates he's getting for ads now will plummet with the traffic levels.

When you look up the phrase "bad plan" in the future, you'll run across an item about this as the prime example...

Unlike Apple and Amazon, bookselling behemoth Barnes & Noble didn't have an e-reading app available for the iPad on day one. But it's just released an iPad version of its eReader

My wife was happy to hear that - it opens up another catalog of books for the iPad. While there are some luddites around claiming that print is better, I don't think that's the issue. This is an additional channel for reading, not a replacement. It will work better for some kinds of reading, and less well for others (I'm thinking textbooks in which you might want to annotate or highlight). Bear in mind though, most of us stop using textbooks after the age of 21 or so, so trumpeting that lack as a key problem is kind of narrow-minded...

Engadget reports that the iPhone is pretty much "wide open", so far as accessing data goes:

Bernd and fellow security guru Jim Herbeck have discovered that plugging even a fully up-to-date, non-jailbroken iPhone 3GS into a computer running Ubuntu Lucid Linux allows nearly full read access to the phone's storage -- even when it's locked

This is why the meme about Macs being secure, while Windows is insecure has been so flawed. I do believe that Unix is a better basis for security than Windows, but - Apple has mostly gotten by on a "security via obscurity" model - Macs are still rare enough (in percentage terms) that it's simply not worth bothering with them. There are so many Windows boxes that it's just better target environment for bad actors.

However, over in mobile-land, things are different. iPhones are very common, so having this kind of vulnerability is the sort of thing that could end up giving Apple some real PR issues.

It turns out that when the complete Lost series is released on DVD, the set will include what Emerson calls an "epilogue" that will focus on Ben and Hurley protecting the Island in the post-Jack era.

"It's 12 or 14 minutes that opens a window onto that gap of unknown time between Hurley becoming number one and the end of the series," Emerson told host Kevin Pereira. "It's self-contained, although it's a rich period in the show's mythology that has never been explored."

So... the flash sideways was the post life before they could move on, but the island story was real. It's all very confusing :)

Engadget reports that Microsoft is expecting to sell 30 million Windows 7 phones by the end of 2011:

We've got to hand it to Microsoft -- when it sets a goal, it really sets a goal. As you can see in the slide above shown during a ReMix event in Paris yesterday, Microsoft is apparently expecting to sell 30 million Windows Phone 7 devices by the end of 2011, based on IDC projections

Umm, how? The phone doesn't exist yet, Apple and Google have well defined products, HP may be breathing new life into Palm, and Microsoft is deeply, deeply confused about their integration story - how does this new device fit in with the XBox and Zune, for instance?

Microsoft squashed the rumor that Ballmer would appear at Apple's WWDC event - and the way they did it is more interesting than the news itself: they tweeted it:

"Steve Ballmer not speaking at Apple Dev Conf. Nor appearing on Dancing with the Stars. Nor riding in the Belmont. Just FYI," the tweet said. The company, however, has no plans to support Objective-C, a Microsoft representative said.

Steve Jobs gets the message out via email, and MS is doing the same sort of thing via Twitter. Somewhere, PR professionals are crying, since their jobs are the ones getting disintermediated.

Sources said several large media companies, including Time Warner and NBC Universal, told Apple they won't retool their extensive video libraries to accommodate the iPad, arguing that such a reformatting would be expensive and not worth it because Flash dominates the Web.

Well - the Flash war won't end anytime soon with that news. That certainly leaves a space for HP (Palm) and Google, if they can create compelling tablets. Of course, that's a big if. The interesting thing that's not mentioned: Microsoft isn't even part of this game...

Not only did CBS cancel what was often Friday night's top-rated series last week, but ABC decided not to give it a shot either. In fact, things have gotten so bad for Jennifer Love Hewitt's veteran series that CBS has decided to can the summer reruns and move the renewed Medium and its reruns into the 8/7C p.m. slot for the summer months.

My wife likes that show, but I think it started to stray when it tried to explain the ghost world too much. Medium does a better job of just working on "if this were possible, how would it play out in the real world"?

So you take the wild premise,but then just run the world normally, but with that premise. Ghost Whisperer tried to do too much explaining. Never mind the killing of the husband, followed by the complete ignorage of his reinstatement in someone else's body, along with the "many years later" trick of having the kid grow up.

We'll be live with Arden Thomas - Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager - at 2 PM EDT. We'll be talking about the upcoming product releases, as well as the roadmap looking forward. If you have questions during the talk, just throw them at us via the chat channel on the streaming site, or over on the Smalltalk IRC channel

"[Companies are] happy to stay with IE6 because ... a lot of the social networking sites and the sites that they deem are unnecessary for work purposes, they're not going to render and function properly within [older versions of] IE," Microsoft's Australian chief security adviser Stuart Strathdee said.

Can't say I've tried Facebook (et. al.) in IE 6 - I don't have it running anywhere. But seriously? With all of the security issues that MS has addressed since IE 6 with the 7 and 8 releases? Any IT department thinking that way needs to be outsourced...

On the one hand, you have people worried that Facebook is exposing too much, and not giving users enough control over the process (never mind Zuckerburg's quite clear mindset on where privacy is headed). On the other hand, Facebook is still growing, and Foursquare has a million people per day "checking in" - i.e., letting the world now the minute details of where they are and what they are up to.

And then there's the dark side of all this - how third parties are trying to use that glut of information to learn more about you - and doing so incompetently:

One day, Greg was called in to see his manager and was told that his services would no longer be needed. He was asked to clear his desk and escorted from the building with no further explanation. His family hadn't even finished unpacking from the cross-country move, and Greg was faced with the shock of unemployment.

Thankfully, after some pushing Greg was able to learn that the company had fired him because the subsequent background check had uncovered a criminal background and outstanding warrants the company was unaware of. Of course, Greg was also unaware of the criminal background and outstanding warrants because the company had uncovered information on the wrong "Greg".

That's the sort of confused privacy world we live in. People are exposing more and more of their lives to the world, are vaguely worried about it, but keep doing it anyway for the immediate (perceived) benefits. I'm not sure where that's going to end up, but it's going to be different than it has been...

It took me a few days of separate efforts - buying the flowers, spreading the dirt, getting the trees delivered - and finally, getting new garden hoses, as a weed whacker seems to have done in the old one - but it finally all came together this morning. I have two photos below; if you're on Facebook, I posted an album.

Jeff Jarvis doesn't like what he sees in an FTC report on how to "save journalism". Like Jarvis, I wasn't aware that journalism needed saving; I am aware that there are (still influential) legacy players that want the field cleared of all those pesky new media types.

And people wonder why I'm skeptical about government. With "help" like what's being talked about here, who needs obstacles?

Nearly half (46 percent) of 18- to 25-year-olds spend as much time using online video services as they do watching TV, says RealNetworks. Research by online video software firm revealed that just under a third (32 percent) say the PC is their preferred platform for watching TV and video.

That tracks pretty well with what I see here - my daughter spends far more time with the net and video games (Xbox and Wii) than she does with TV. For that matter, so do I. I'm not entirely sure what changed, but over the last few years I've found TV to be less and less interesting. The only shows I really cared to watch on a regular basis this last few months have been Lost (now ended), Stargate: Universe, Dr. Who, and Fringe. There are other things my wife likes that I tolerate, but I don't much care about. My daughter is even further down that path; the only show I've seen her have real interest in lately is Dr. Who.

This will have a rather large impact on the standard TV/advertising model as the next decade unfolds.

Charles Stross makes some good points about the pros and cons of the iPad - his take on Flash is funny, but then I ran across this:

Secondary motive: I want to stay current. I have a bunch of O'Reilly nutshell books on Python. I would like to be able to open a terminal and run a python interpreter while I work through the tutorials. Ditto ruby, smalltalk, or whatever else I want to play with. The "no interpreters" rule in the app store gets right up my nose.

While average users neither know nor care about that rule, the tech influencers do care. I didn't think that mattered at first - which, given my role as a Smalltalk evengelist might be surprising - but I'm starting to think it will matter. As happened with PC's "back in the day", Android (or WebOS) tablets will eventually have a "good enough" user experience, and the open nature of them will matter. Apple lost that war once; they might be setting themselves up to lose a second time.

When the UK Smalltalk User Group started planning the Camp Smalltalk London event a few weeks ago, we imagined we might get 20 people. After only four days, 30 have signed up and we're jumping to figure out how many more people are interested and how many more we can handle. There are certainly worse problems to have!

My wife was channel surfing this evening, and I had to ask her to pause - we ran across "Red Dead Redemption". At first I thought it was a trailer ad for the game, but it's a 30 minute movie - filmed inside the game engine:

But the story doesn't end there; instead of posting the video online or on the consoles the game is out on, the RDR short film will be debuting on Fox this Saturday at midnight. That's right: it's a damn television premiere.

The day is approaching when this kind of production will give actors a run for their money...

"The [Justice Dept.] is doing outreach," an anonymous Hollywood source told the Post. "You can't dictate terms to the industry. The Adobe thing is just inviting the wrath of everybody."

Someone should just ask this first - after all the yelling and legal maneuvering, exactly what did the Microsoft cases amount to? Lots of money for lawyers, and precious little else. The competition moved MS back, not the DOJ - although I suppose you could argue that the DOJ made MS skittish enough that they didn't engage well. I'm not sure I'd call that a win.

Now it's Apple's turn. And you know what? In the mobile space, there's plenty of competition. I don't think Google needs help, and it looks like HP is jumping in with WebOS. And Microsoft is trying (not well, but that goes back to being skittish, I think), with their planned Windows 7 phones. What exactly can the DOJ do that won't be done better by letting this play out?

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holding what, on the surface, would have seemed to be a relatively safe 10-5 lead over one of the worst teams in baseball, Joe Girardi decided it was time to embark on what we have come to call "the constant search for the one guy who doesn't have it" and, in the course of three Yankee pitching changes, the Indians batted around to take a 12-10 lead.

In the midst of that mess, one of the pitchers thrown into the fray got a man out on a routine flyball, but was then pulled - likely on the basis of some stat lurking on a clipboard. What the clipboard doesn't show is the intangible "he has good stuff" thing. Some days athletes do well; other days, they're just off. I say that as a guy who ran track and cross country in high school, and I remember plenty of "on" and "off" days.

In modern baseball, that concept has been totally lost. Instead, it's all pitch counts, individual matchups, and other arcane stats. The notion that someone might be "on" is utterly gone.

Now, going with your gut is probably not the best way to run a baseball team - the moneyball thing has paid dividends. But... it's also overused, and Girardi seems to be an utter slave to the idea. When it comes to pitching, it's obvious that he never pays attention to what's going on out on the field - it's only the clipboard that matters to him.

After August 2010, Skype will start charging a “small monthly fee” for use of the 3G calling feature. You heard that right — even though you’re already paying AT&T (in the U.S., at least) for your data plan, Skype is throwing in an extra fee. At this point we’re not sure if the move is Skype’s own doing, or if the network operators had a hand in trying to make the Skype app a less desirable option.

In contrast, a station with eight Eaton/TEPCO Quick Chargers could theoretically fuel just 24 i-Mievs to 80-percent full in an hour. To match the capacity of a modest gas station, completely filling 160 i-Mievs to 100-percent of battery capacity (on 25 minute charges) in one hour, would take at least 67 Quick Chargers with one parking space for each charger. Figure 300-square feet of space for each charger and parking spot and that’s a half acre of land before accounting for driveways or other infrastructure

Mind you, that kind of "quick charge" also depletes battery life - everything I've been reading says that you would, as an owner, want to limit the number of quick charges you did. Which means the picture is even worse - imagine the typical recharge station requiring a 4-6 hour parking time. That's fine if everyone lives within range of their destination (work, say), and they don't ever have to drive anywhere else after they get to work. A few minutes pondering how we actually use our cars will puncture that fantasy pretty quickly.

Of course, there's another issue as well. The "clean power" for these vehicles doesn't jump magically from a wall; in fact, it may well come from a coal fired plant. And if you were to replace a significant number of cars with electric vehicles, well - I think you would need to start putting in new generation capacity as well.

Forgotten in the stream of "beginning of summer" barbecues is where Memorial Day came from - it was originally set aside as "Decoration Day" - a day to honor the fallen from the US Civil War. Over time it's become a day to remember US veterans in general, from all wars and eras, but - I think it's useful to recall the original idea. The Civil War remains a huge breaking point between then and now - before, "United States" was often plural, whereas after, it became singular. A small seeming change, but it's had a lot of impact over time.

Sitting here in Maryland in 2010, it's hard to imagine the depth of feeling people in 1861 had for their regions and states. That could be because I'm a transplant from New York, surrounded by other transplants from all over, but it's the way things are. It's not only times that change - nations and the people who comprise them change over time as well.

I just finished a fairly engaging techno-thriller: Counterstrike: The Last World War, Book 2. It's a follow on from The Last World War
, something I read a few years ago. I happened upon the book at Borders while getting my daughter an AP prep guide; I had mostly forgotten about the earlier book.

It's a typical techno-thriller, with a Stargate wormhole type of plot device. The kicker - aliens fighting a long (think generations) war create the technology, hoping to use it as a game changer, allowing them to deploy across their own planet. Instead, they end up accidentally opening wormholes to Earth, and humanity gets involved in the war.

Through the first book, it's not at all clear why the war was happening; in the second book, a vague "cold war gone hot" device crops up, with Earth siding with the "Western" side of the conflict. An anti-war group becomes something of a plot device in the second book, but not for long - mostly, they help set up the predictable plot twist that puts the book on the race track towards the conclusion.

The story was fun enough to read, in a "beach reading" sort of way - although I really wonder how much longer authors can pull out grizzled Vietnam war vets to fight again. Seriously - that's a long time ago now :) On the other hand, how many techno-thrillers have you read recently where a North Korean tank jockey is one of the good guys?

Anyway, if you pick up these books, don't expect anything deep. They are enjoyable yarns, but that's about it.

I just finished reading a the book Power Hungry
- it's a good book, detailing where the power of today and tomorrow are likely to come from. You have to be willing to deal with some math to read this book - and the math makes it pretty clear (at least to me) that wind and solar are not going to be more than bit players in our energy future.

That all comes down to something pretty simple: energy density. To over-simplify a lot, how much space do you need in order to generate a given amount of energy? For things like coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear (or for vehicles, gas), the space you need is pretty small, and you can locate the power generation capacity close to where the power is needed. For things like wind and solar, you need gobs of space, and, generally speaking, they need to be located pretty far away from where the power they generate is needed.

And that doesn't even get into the intermittancy problem (which the author, Robert Bryce, covers in some detaiil). I've written recently about my skepticism about electric cars, and one of the more amusing parts of this book is the series of headlines about electric cars being "the future" - with that series beginning in 1901. It seems that electric vehicles have been the "wave of the future" for a long time, and the problem remains the same now as it was for Edison - battery capacity and life.

Bryce thinks the future belongs to what he calls N2N - Natural gas and nuclear - and he makes the point that if you are concerned about air pollution (either CO2, or, to me at least, the more dangerous toxins that are emitted by burning things like coal), you should favor that future as well.

That's a very brief summary of his points - like I said, Bryce marshals a lot of data in support of his conclusions. I'd recommend taking a look before you draw your own conclusions. I think he makes a ton of sense.

On January 19, 2010, Rosenberg was apparently trying to get from 96 Daly Street, Park City, Utah, to 1710 Prospector Avenue, Park City, Utah. She looked up the walking directions using Google Maps on her Blackberry. Google Maps suggested a route that included a half-mile walk down "Deer Valley Drive," which is also known as "Utah State Route 224." There's not much more to say--she started walking down the middle of a highway, and a car hit her. Who wouldn't have seen that one coming?

It's useful to read Nick Carr from a "there's a set of ideas to avoid" standpoint. Take his latest on the humble link:

Sometimes, they're big distractions - we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we've forgotten what we'd started out to do or to read. Other times, they're tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don't click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not.

Now, imagine Carr a few thousand years ago, when the written word appeared. He would have fulminated against it as the "death of storytelling". To an extent, he would even have been correct - no one develops memorization skills as our ancestors did anymore. Then again, we don't have to - Wikipedia (et. al.) are never more than a link away.

Carr has become a force in favor of inertia. He's comfortable with a certain level of technology, and pretty much wants things to stay in his comfort zone. The trouble is, he sounds just reasonable enough to get a few shallow thinkers to follow along.

Today's Smalltalk Daily is part 2 of a 3 part look at the VisualWorks UI Painter (GUI Builder) tools. Today we look at hooking up the UI to a domain model. If you want to see part 1, go here. Click on the viewer below to watch it now:

Over the weekend I finished a depressing book - Vox Day's The Return of the Great Depression
. Day doesn't have much patience for the Keynesian model of economics; in fact, there's a fairly extended discussion of the flaws (as Day sees them) in Paul Krugman's thinking.

You may not agree with Day's take on things, but one thing's for sure - it's quite different than what you'll see on CNBC, or just about anywhere else in business/economic reporting. What he says about debt and fiat currency makes a lot of sense to me (although I have no idea what the "right" answer is to the huge levels of debt that all governments seem to have acquired). Suffice to say that Day is not optimistic - the title of his book pretty much gives away where he thinks things are going.

He quotes Mish Shedlock a few times in the text, and I enjoy reading Mish's blog. If you want a non-mainstream take on how things are going, you'll get it from this book and from Mish. I think it's worth getting the perspective, even if you come away unconvinced.

Of course, they wouldn't be publishers if they didn't also lust after robust DRM measures, which might explain why they're not roundly supporting the readily available EPUB format. It has DRM options, but perhaps they're not gnarly enough for the dudes responsible for bringing us the psychological horror of the Twilight series. We still don't like the suggestion that the people, Amazon primarily, who popularized this market should just open it up out of the goodness of their own hearts -- maybe we would if publishers ever showed themselves capable of doing similarly noble things.

Really, that about sums it up. If they want a standard, what's wrong with ePub?

This leaves a huge opening for Google (and eventually HP, if they get anywhere with WebOS):

I see now why people are so angry at the ‘murky’ nature of the App Store, and I’m starting to agree with them. My Frame was approved by Apple 3 times (once for each version we released), and then now, at version 1.2 they decide it’s to be removed? How can a company be prepared to invest into a platform that can change at any time, cutting you off and kicking you out, with no course of action but to whine on some no-name blog. There is no alternative platform, despite what others may say about Android, it’s immature and their app store(s) are a wild west nightmare. It really is Apple’s way or the highway, and that really stinks.

That kind of unpredictability isn't at all good for a business plan. It works for Apple now, because there's something of a void beyond them. However, all it'll take is for Google and/or HP to create something "good enough" to start luring developers across - because predictability will trump coolness....

Along with a host of other changes to their billing plans for data, ATT will finally be rolling out tethering (although tethering will wait for OS 4). The big change - the "unlimited" data plan is gone, replaced by a 2 tier plan with - wait for it - reasonable overage charges. Engadget has the details.

Warning: the first idiot who writes a comment on this post pointing out the "irony" of its links will be tracked down, tortured, and shot.

In discussing reaction to his piece on links and attention span, he pretty much had to link to other people - what's a discussion otherwise?

The part of this I find amusing is this: Carr seems to think that the web will destroy long form, immersive reading. Excuse me? When was there a huge amount of that going on anyway? Long form reading is (and always has been) engaged in by a fairly small number of people. This supposed golden age of media that Carr seems to yearn for never existed. Most newspapers prior to the mid 20th century were openly biased scandal sheets; there was a brief confluence of technology that allowed a few people (like Carr, it seems) to believe that journalists were some new class of objective uber-men, able to convey the news to us poor heathens in a pure form.

What hasn't occurred to Carr is this: stuff on the net is one form of writing, consumed in a particular way. Books are a different form of writing, consumed in another. Some people prefer one over the other, just as there were plenty of people back in the 80's who preferred "People" to "The Wall Street Journal".

There's no "winner" or "loser" here; there's just a new form of writing and reading. Maybe Carr can't consume books like he used to; that sounds like a personal problem. As you can see here, I haven't run across that problem, and I'm pretty heavily immersed in this whole internet thing.

Today's Smalltalk Daily is part 3 of a 3 part look at the VisualWorks UI Painter (GUI Builder) tools. Today we look at hooking up the UI to a domain model. If you want to see part 1, go here - for part 2, go here. Click on the viewer below to watch it now:

as reader Giorgio Galante found out today, sending AT&T's CEO two emails in two weeks results in a phone call from AT&T's Executive Response Team and a warning that further emails will result in a cease and desist letter

I wonder if AT&T can spell PR - even if you spot them the first two letters...

With the rationales being offered by AT&T (and various consultants) for the changes to their data plans, I'm reminded of Vizzini's constant cry in "The Princess Bride":

But industry analysts said that when customers take “unlimited” literally, those plans rapidly become money losers for the companies — and lead to network congestion.

Gosh, how dare those pesky customers - taking the words the vendor used to describe the service seriously! Next thing you know, those pesky customers will also expect honest bills and polite service. The horror.

Giorgio Galante has released the contents of the email he sent to AT&T's CEO, along with the audio for the awesomely stupid response he got back. A company with a clue would have had something resembling a response by now, but I guess that's not AT&T.

Looks like they did recognize how bad this looked. Engadget reports that ATT has apologized to Galante:

Giorgio tells us that he's received a sincere apology from an AT&T senior VP, who took responsibility for the mixup. Apparently the cease and desist warning came about due to bad reading of AT&T internal policy -- Giorgio was told the rep who made the call is "not having the best of days today" -- and AT&T tells us it's reviewing its procedures to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Still - I wonder how awesome the next chat between Jobs and Stephenson will be?

While I like the XBox, I was annoyed by this - I went off to exercise earlier (stationary bike), and took the XBox upstairs with me. I don't have the wifi adaptor for the XBox, and there's no wire in that room, but I figured that shouldn't be a problem - I fired up Mass Effect 2
.

Wrong

It requires a connection. No problem - I grabbed my Macbook, set up internet sharing, and hooked the wire up. Easy, right? Well.... no. It didn't work. I didn't have all day, so I just went back and played another game, but I Googled later, and came up with this:

Start Internet Sharing

Edit /etc/bootpd.plist as root: change reply_threshold_seconds to 0

Reboot. Yes, you really do have to reboot. Don't start/stop Internet Sharing before rebooting because it will revert your change on you

Erf. Next time I give things a go, I'll try that. I've never had an issue sharing a connection from the Mac, either to other Macs or Windows PCs, so I'm kind of puzzled by this one...